If you don’t know the state of your network, you’re like a blind pilot, inevitably headed for disaster. Fortunately, the market now offers many good software solutions, both commercial and open source, for network monitoring.

SD-WAN and MPLS are two technologies that are often perceived as either-or solutions. For many organizations, however, SD-WAN and MPLS can complement each other. This article will define and compare the technologies, explaining how, in many cases, they work together. We’ll also explore SD-WAN’s popularity and its role in enabling modern security architectures like SASE.

SMB stands for Server Message Block, once known as Common Internet File System, is a communication protocol for providing shared access between systems on a network. At a high level, it is a set of rules adopted to share files, printers in a network. SMB is a file sharing protocol that involves computers communicating with each other in a local network. This local network could be a small business within the same office or a multi-national company with offices around the globe connected to each other.

Network operations teams rely on highly specialized tools developed by individual vendors designed to address particular problems. The result? Most enterprises have 10+ Network Operations applications in place and they don’t talk to each other—which means that network operations engineers spend an exhaustive and unnecessary amount of time toggling between applications and sifting through information as they work to resolve tickets.

From exposing your network vulnerabilities to becoming a passageway for intruders, open ports can pose several risk vectors that threaten your network’s confidentiality, integrity, and availability. This is why it’s a best practice to close your open ports. To tackle the risks introduced by open ports, network admins rely on port scanning tools to identify, inspect, analyze, and close open ports in their networks.

SCADA stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, and although it’s not likely to be the first thing to come to mind when discussing cyber security, it certainly should be. As its name implies, it is a type of software designed to supervise – controlling and monitoring – and collect data and well as analyze data for industrial processes.

A wireless LAN (WLAN), also commonly called Wi-Fi, is a wireless local area network defined in the various IEEE 802.11 standards and certified by Wi-Fi Alliance. WLAN capability used to be listed using the name of the IEEE standard amendment that it supports. Now the Wi-Fi Alliance uses generational numbering for corresponding technology support: Wi-Fi 4 (for devices implementing IEEE 802.11n), Wi-Fi 5 (IEEE 802.11ac), and Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax).

Did you hear about the change window that went exactly as planned? No? That’s because the odds of winning the PowerBall without buying a ticket are better than the odds of executing a change window on a global network without a glitch. What about the story of the tier one network engineer that diagnosed and resolved an ACL in seconds? That one also seems as mythical as staying friends with your ex—but it’s not.

If you follow cybersecurity current events, you may know that the cost and frequency of a data breach continue to skyrocket. Organizations are constantly under attack, and the shift to remote work is only exacerbating the problem. According to IBM’s 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report, most respondents are concerned that identifying, containing, and paying for a data breach is more burdensome today than ever before.